January 16, 2007

Great minds of today, revisited

One Santa Fe woman claims another is holding hostage DVDs of an Iowa man on the verge of unlocking the “code of the universe.”

“This will change our science, the atomic code, everything,” said Jeanne O’Dean, who recently moved to Santa Fe from Boston. “But I really don’t want to give any more detail.”

Late last year, O’Dean hired videographer Laureen Pepersac to travel with her to Strawberry Point, Iowa, to record Duane Whitlock, who claims to have discovered new laws of physics.

Whitlock said, for example, that he has “undeniable proof that the spectrum of light is hexadynamic, not the linear structure that it has been long believed to be.” He said he’s self-educated and hasn’t received a college degree.

After Pepersac and O’Dean returned from Iowa, they got into a dispute over Pepersac’s fee—$800 a day. O’Dean filed a handwritten complaint Jan. 8 in state District Court, accusing Pepersac of overcharging her and then keeping DVDs worth $2 million as “intellectual property.” Judge Daniel Sanchez has yet to set a hearing. O’Dean seeks possession of the DVDs in the complaint.

O’Dean said she is applying for a patent on Whitlock’s concepts. She said he cannot apply for a patent because he has already published books about his ideas. O’Dean asked a reporter not to write about her lawsuit because she is “trying to protect my investment.”

… Pepersac, in a phone interview, said she has never been paid and should counter-sue O’Dean for maliciously using the courts.

She said she realized O’Dean was “a psycho con artist” after they returned to Santa Fe and O’Dean asked to borrow $100 to cover a check she had written to Whitlock. She said she kept the original DVDs and sent copies to Whitlock because he is the only person who has paid her.

“People want to believe other people,” she said. “I wanted to believe Jeanne at first. ... Then it got weirder and weirder. I realize this woman has zero money. She has zero ability to be able to do anything. She’s talking this huge story, just shuffling stuff all around.”

… The “kernel” of what Whitlock is saying is that “everything is in constant change,” [Pepersac] said. “Darwin evolution and Newtonian physics are old paradigms. ... It’s no longer survival of the fittest. We’ve evolved beyond that.”

Whitlock, 89, declined comment on “anything that these two young ladies got into.” But in a telephone interview, he agreed to talk about his ideas if a reporter would “stop calling them theories—they’re facts.”

For example, he said his concept of “intelligent design” isn’t a euphemism for Biblical creation, but rather looking at design as the product of the mind, not a physical property that can be measured. “You look at a desk or a chair or a cupboard, you see the design of it,” he said. “The wood comes out of a tree, but you’ve never seen a tree that was growing tables and chairs and stuff like that.”

In a self-published book, The Search for Intelligent Design, which Whitlock sells for $30 each, he describes a six-sided atomic structure with parts linked to colors—red for protons, green for “cosmic ray,” blue for electrons, orange for the “energy packet,” yellow for neutrons and violet for gamma rays.

“Nobody in this world today knows what I’m just telling you,” he said. “This completely revises our science paradigm, and nobody knows that either, but when they do know it, this book is going to be pretty darn valuable.”